"The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation. That was hardly the fate I expected for the magazine," writes Peretz, who served as editor-in-chief from 1974, when he bought the magazine, until 2011.

The old New Republic was certainly liberal, especially in its editorials (early support for the Iraq War notwithstanding). But Peretz believes Hughes -- a former Obama campaign staffer -- has let a new, unrestrained leftism bleed into the magazine's reporting at the expense of honest, critical journalism. He even states that President Obama, who Hughes and editor Franklin Foer interviewed for the first issue, has become "an object of fealty at the New Republic."

"Mr. Hughes is not from the world of Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, the old-school liberals who founded the 'journal of opinion' in the hope that it would foment in its readers 'little insurrections of the mind,'" Peretz writes.

"There is something strange about Chris Hughes's journalistic vision," Peretz argues. "He has said in public and to me that he intended for the magazine no longer to be known as a liberal journal, for it not to take up only one side of an issue. Fair enough.... But maybe editorials are no longer needed, given the articles themselves. The magazine now seems to live in a space where those 'little insurrections of the mind' are unwelcome."